Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith is a NPR White House Correspondent and co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast. During the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton.

Prior to moving into her current role in January 2014, Keith was a Congressional Correspondent who put an emphasis on covering House Republicans, the budget, taxes, and the fiscal fights that dominated at the time. She began covering Congress in August 2011.

Keith joined NPR in 2009 as a Business Reporter. In that role, she reported on topics spanning the business world from covering the debt downgrade and debt ceiling crisis to the latest in policy debates, legal issues, and technology trends. In early 2010, she was on the ground in Haiti covering the aftermath of the country's disastrous earthquake and later she covered the oil spill in the Gulf. In 2011, Keith conceived of and solely reported The Road Back To Work, a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work.

Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. While in college, she launched her career at NPR Member station KQED's California Report, covering topics including agriculture and the environment. In 2004, Keith began working at NPR Member station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, where she reported on politics and the 2004 presidential campaign.

Keith then went back to California to open the state capital bureau for NPR Member station KPCC/Southern California Public Radio. In 2006, Keith returned to KQED, serving as the Sacramento-region reporter for two years.

In 2001, Keith began working on B-Side Radio, an hour-long public radio show and podcast that she co-founded, produced, hosted, edited, and distributed for nine years.

Keith earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Keith is part of the Politics Monday team on the PBS NewsHour, a weekly segment rounding up the latest political news. Keith is also a member of the Bad News Babes, a media softball team that once a year competes against female members of Congress in the Congressional Women's Softball game.

Republican leaders plan to bring the American Health Care Act to the floor of the House for a vote next Thursday, and President Trump is now publicly applying his deal-making skills to ensure passage.

"I just want to let the world know, I am 100 percent in favor," Trump told reporters brought to the Oval Office to see the tail end of his meeting with about a dozen members of the Republican Study Committee. That group of House members includes some who'd been lukewarm about the bill going into the meeting.

President Trump's budget blueprint calls for eliminating dozens of government programs and zeroing out funding for 19 independent agencies. And that may only be a preview of things to come as the Trump administration seeks to reorganize the executive branch.

When 2011 began, the worst recession in two generations was technically over, but Annica Trotter, Ray Meyer, and Jennifer and Brian Barfield were unemployed and searching for work. Six years later, their experience demonstrates life doesn't just snap back to normal after a job loss. Their economic recovery remains incomplete and in some ways their story is America's story.

President Trump is returning to the campaign trail Saturday night. Yes, it's less than a month into his presidency. But Trump's campaign, which never shut down after he won the election, is organizing the rally in Melbourne, Fla.

It's been a tumultuous start for Trump — from alternative facts about the size of his inauguration crowd, to courts halting his travel ban executive order and this week having to ask his national security adviser to resign. But now Trump is returning to the comfortable embrace of a campaign rally.

It's been a fast-paced and rocky start for the Trump White House. There have been reports of infighting and even talk of a possible staff shakeup after just three weeks. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith joins us now. Hi, Tam.

If President Trump were to call a meeting of his Cabinet today, he wouldn't need a very big table. Or, he'd have to invite a bunch of Obama administration holdovers serving temporarily in acting roles.

President Trump signed a record number of executive orders and presidential memoranda his first week in office — a total of 14 compared to President Obama's 13. But something is noticeably absent from those directives — ethics for the executive branch.

As early as today, we may find out what President Trump means by extreme vetting. That's the phrase he settled on for the way he would want to screen visitors from certain countries. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith is on the line to talk about this and much more.

Shortly before Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Friday, Mike Pence will put his hand on Ronald Reagan's Bible and be sworn in as vice president. It's a job that has varied in influence from administration to administration. So how will Pence cut his path?

Gen. Michael Flynn, President-elect Trump's pick to be national security adviser, did speak to Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak by telephone on Dec. 29, the same day the Obama administration announced measures retaliating against Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential campaign, two Trump transition officials confirm to NPR.

The website at the Office of Government Ethics went down Friday afternoon, apparently overwhelmed with traffic, as the agency and its director found themselves at the heart of a growing political fight.

Even before Barack Obama moved into the White House, he and his team made a choice that made actually selling his policies to the public more difficult.

In December 2008, Obama's economic team gathered in Chicago to map out what would become the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"A dispute, discussion, something breaks out at that meeting. We haven't even come in yet," said Austan Goolsbee, a professor at the University of Chicago, who was a top economic adviser in the early years of the Obama presidency.

President-elect Donald Trump sat for a deposition on Thursday in a civil lawsuit related to his hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed to NPR via email. Even as Trump prepares to assume the presidency, he continues to have entanglements related to his wide-ranging business dealings.

Hillary Clinton has kept a low profile since losing the election to Donald Trump, but at a private event before donors Thursday night, she blamed her loss, in part, on "some unprecedented factors" — namely Russian hacking and the letter about the investigation into her email server released by FBI Director James Comey days before the election.

We've created this handy widget to track how long it has been since Donald Trump held a formal press conference and how many times he has tweeted in that time. It will keep counting until he holds one.

Why are we tracking this?

Unlike other ways of getting messages out, press conferences hold public officials more accountable to the American people because they have to answer questions in an uncontrolled environment.

With the selection of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state and the expected nomination of Rick Perry for the Department of Energy, Donald Trump's Cabinet has largely taken shape in Trump's own image — a combination of millionaires, billionaires, outsiders and even a few politicians who oppose the work of the very agencies they've been tapped to lead.

There were moments when watching the Trump and Clinton campaigns discuss the election at the Campaign Managers Conference at the Harvard Institute of Politics was like watching The Jerry Springer Show without the chair-throwing (or paternity disputes).

The 2016 campaign was an ugly, knock-down, drag-out fight between two different visions of America. So it was fitting that the typically polite and clinical quadrennial gathering of campaign professionals would erupt into shouting matches and accusations raw with emotion.